Sample Chapter: Silverbane

“Okay, that’s the end of our session. See you next month, Jane.” The old woman turned and walked out of the room without a second glance.

“Jade,” Jade muttered under he breath, but the trust was, she preferred this woman to the previous guy who’d run these jobseeker meetings. He’d been so enthusiastic about trying to get everyone into a job, pushing people to apply for every job on every website and piling the pressure on any time someone tool a moment to breathe.

And the thing was, when you were on a jobseeker payment, you couldn’t afford to do that. You couldn’t afford to search for work too proactively. Because the fact was that there weren’t enough jobs, and most of the people in these meetings were going to be taking them for years, and if you didn’t get in a certain minimum number of applications every fortnight, you didn’t get paid and couldn’t pay rent. Jade had to apply to twelve jobs per fortnight, and there weren’t twelve new jobs available every fortnight. That meant rationing things. If she applied to all fifty jobs she might qualify for in one period, and then there was no one to apply to the next period… well, that would be a black mark on her record, one step closer to getting cut off entirely. And these meetings, which were supposed to help everyone get jobs, had nothing to teach anyone, so they just sat everyone in a room and told them to apply for jobs. That meant that it was a bad idea to apply to any jobs before the meeting and that one was obligated to very, very slowly click through job applications for two hours in this small room with a bunch of other jobseekers, not moving so slowly as to look like you weren’t working, not to move so quickly as to have applied to all twelve with plenty of time left over and be forced to cut into the precious pile of not-yet-applied jobs being hoarded for next fortnight. And these days, with everyone using computer systems to track applications, you couldn’t apply to the same job each time; they had your resume on record and wouldn’t let you apply again. Making it even harder to find somewhere you were actually qualified for, forcing the jobseekers to pour wildly unsuitable resumes into the inboxes of already overworked hirers for prestigious positions (and probably getting themselves blacklisted from promising companies in the process), or to give their details to obvious scam companies in ‘applying’ for pyramid schemes.

So Jade preferred this disinterested woman over a trying to convince a too-involved guy that she totally didn’t notice that the job she was applying for needed a forklift certification.

She packed up her stuff, double-checked that her name was marked off the attendance list, and got out of there.

Were they out of milk? Should she pick up milk on the way home? Kevin had been on one of his breakfast cereal kicks recently, so probably. The price of milk had gone up by ANOTHER ten cents per litre last week, like the supermarket thought that if they crept it up slowly enough then people wouldn’t notice, but Jade was sure that it wasn’t all that long ago that it had only been one dollar per –

She slowed down, eyeing the building to her right. The main road seemed to become more and more abandoned every year, with old shops closing left and right; one of the perils of living outside the city. Occasionally, some new doomed venture would open up, the pet project of some poor naive entrepreneur charmed by the low shop rental costs and not stopping to question why. The pawn shop she was passing had definitely not been there two days ago, so it was presumably one such venture, but already it was curiously full of stuff. TVs, power tools, towering shelves of games from out of date consoles; the usual pawn shop stuff. How’d they acquired so much over a couple of days? Had they imported things from a previous location?

Jade didn’t need a second hand TV or a child’s bike with chipped paint. But her gaze caught on the HELP WANTED sign in the window. They wouldn’t hire her, obviously, nobody hired overweight 31-year-old high school dropouts with one hand, but she needed twelve businesses to put on next fortnight’s jobseeker form, and she had a handful of paper resumes in her bag that she’d updated less than ten minutes ago.

Inside the shop was fairly cramped, which was strange, because Jade knew this shop should actually be quite large; she’d been here when it was a cafe and it was enormous. She approached the heavy wooden desk, covered in a fine layer of dust and looking like an ancient part of the shop even though it absolutely had not been in here two days ago, and taped the little antique service bell. With no delay at all, as if she’d been lurking on the other side of the door, a woman swept out of a staff area behind the desk and loomed silently.

It should be hard for her to loom, since she was shorter than Jade. She was also fairly old looking, perhaps in her seventies or eighties, with heavy wrinkles and a positively skeletal form. Thick glasses swamped tiny, beady eyes and she wore, strangely enough, a suit. Jade would’ve expected a shawl and an ancient skirt, but no. The outfit looked expensive. Her hair defied her apparent age, long and thick and silky, although completely white, and tied back in a severe braid. She appraised Jade like a bug catcher evaluating a new butterfly.

“You have something to trade,” she said in a clear, if reedy, voice.

“Um. I wanted to apply for the job?” Jade handed over a resume. It lingered awkwardly in her outstretched hand for several seconds before the woman seemed to realise it was being offered to her. She took it and began reading.

“You have time to trade. For money. How much of it?”

“… Sorry?”

“How many hours can you work?”

“Uhm. How many do you need?”

“Four hours every weekday. Eight to twelve.”

“Y-yeah, I can do that.”

“Can you start tomorrow morning?”

“Yes.”

“Great.” She reached under the counter and handed Jade a few sheets of paper – an employment contract. “If you bring this in with you tomorrow, we can get started.”

Jade frowned at the paper. She frowned at the woman. She adjusted her pose to make sure that the woman could see her missing right hand. Which usually made any potential employer suddenly realise she wasn’t the right candidate for mysterious and definitely very legal and fair reasons, and tried to remember if she’d lied too outrageously on the resume, but no, it was close enough to the truth to not cause any trouble. Already, her heart was sinking. This was too easy. Places that hired a stranger this easily were usually bad news; scams, or places so bad to work that the employee turnover rate was through the roof.

But maybe she’d get a few paychecks out of it before everything went to shit.

“Thank you,” she said to the woman, but she was already leaving.

Jade read the contract on the way home. Minimum wage, as she’d expected. The job title was ‘retail assistant’, and the description looked pretty standard – cleaning, manning the register, normal stuff. No immediately obvious red flags. The woman had pre-signed the contract, which Jade didn’t think was standard, but she didn’t usually get this far so maybe it was. Her name was Audrey Myne. Jade pulled out a pen, rested it against a wall to sign it, and put it in her bag. She couldn’t believe it. Somehow, against all the odds, her jobseeker meeting had technically been responsible for actually getting her a job.

There was a butcher knife on the shoe rack inside Jade’s front door, because of course there was. “Kevin! Have you been buying knives again?”

“No!” the voice came back from the lounge.

“Then why is there a knife on the shoe rack?”

“That’s been there for ages! It’s for intruders!”

“Why? So they can arm themselves on their way in?” She put her shoes next to the knife and trudged in. “What do you mean it’s been there for ages? I use that shoe rack every day and I’ve never – oh, shit.”

Kevin was on the couch. Football was on the TV, and since it was the middle of the afternoon on a Wednesday, it probably wasn’t something that just started up after whatever he was watching – Kevin would’ve had to seek out football. There was a vodka and coke in his hand. Several empty coke cans and a half-empty bottle of vodka sat on the coffee table next to him, atop miscellaneous papers and bills from the last few months.

“Victoria?”

“She said she needed a break.”

Well, at least she’d dumped him politely. They weren’t always polite. “Princess or bitch?”

He blinked. “I love her so much.”

Princess, then. Kevin was not in the mood to talk about what a horrible person his ex was. Jade picked up a random glass that probably hadn’t been out for more than a couple of days, poured herself a vodka and coke, and slumped down into a chair. “You feeling okay?”

“Yeah. How’d the meeting go?”

“I got myself a job.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding. I start at 8am tomorrow.”

“Ha. Sucks to be you.”

“A paycheck’s a paycheck. What happened with Victoria?”

“I don’t know! I thought things were great and then I get a text!”

“She dumped you over text?” Maybe she wasn’t so polite.

“She didn’t dump me, she just needs a break.” Kevin tipped back the dregs of his drink and reached unsteadily for the vodka. Jade pulled the glass out of his hand, filled it herself, and handed it back. “Jade, do you think maybe the problem is me?”

“I dunno. Not a dating expert. But you’re a good guy, so.”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so.” She gulped her drink. “Now let’s eat, drink and be miserable, for tomorrow we both have jobs to get to.”

“Do we have anything to eat?”

“I think there’s leftover Chinese. Fucked if I’m cooking tonight, and you’re too drunk to.”

“You’re good too, Jade.”

“Don’t you fucking know it. And you’re lucky to have me.” She got up to go check for Chinese food. Life really was just one fucking thing after another.

At least she’d done this song and dance often enough that she could expect all the things to be familiar.